As your business grows, time quickly becomes your most valuable and scarce resource. For many business owners, automation is the solution.
By automating the most time-consuming tasks, you and your team can operate more efficiently and respond better to consumer demands.
A business process that is experiencing a rapid surge in automation is marketing. Studies show that 68% of businesses use some form of marketing automation.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a technology capable of automating repetitive marketing activities. It refers to software that relieves marketers from tedious tasks such as the manual distribution of email marketing, the management of social media posts, and the delivery of ad campaigns.
Most marketing automation tools rely on a simplified series of steps or workflow to streamline the workload of marketers and generate more leads for the business.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Good marketing automation combined with excellent strategy offers businesses a myriad of benefits.
- Marketing Automation tools empower businesses to reach a significantly wider audience than would otherwise be possible. Studies show that businesses who implement marketing automation experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. Businesses who devote efforts to cultivating these leads will have a higher chance of converting them into paying customers.
- Additionally, marketing automation tools can foster collaboration between the marketing and sales departments in a company – it makes it easier for marketing and sales to work in alignment and convert leads into sales.
- Automating certain marketing processes can also greatly reduce costs as a business. Research shows that marketing automation can result in a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. “Business owners looking to reduce marketing costs should consider automation,” advises Marion Saldana, a career blogger at Draftbeyond and Writinity. “It can help small businesses succeed without being too labor intensive.”
- In addition to improving sales and cutting the costs, marketing automation drastically boosts efficiency when implemented properly. Marketing teams who take advantage of this technology can save time and energy from completing more mundane, repetitive tasks manually. Instead, automation frees up time for exclusively human activities such as developing brilliant marketing strategies and nurturing strong relationships with clients.
- Another benefit of marketing automation is more accurate analytics and reports. Most marketing automation software excel at providing highly detailed and useful reports. Marketers, in turn, can use the customer insights from these reports to evaluate the success of past campaigns, improve existing processes, and formulate a better strategy moving forward.
What To Look For In A Marketing Automation Tool
While there are plenty of marketing automation software with amazing features for marketers to choose from, it’s important to prioritize effortless and user-friendly integration during your evaluation.
Some useful features to look for in a marketing automation platform include campaign management capable of handling multiple campaigns and content management for creating and tracking content across several channels.
Another feature to look for is an analytics and reporting function. This provides businesses with insights to continuously improve their marketing strategy.
Other helpful tools for marketers include lead capture and nurture, and CRM integration.
Ways To Use Marketing Automation To Boost Sales
There are several ways to incorporate automation in your marketing processes to drive growth as a business.
Here are some of the most popular uses among marketers.
Multi-Channel Management
Marketing automation is a great tool for marketers running several campaigns across multiple channels.
“Technology can automate the most monotonous parts of the marketing process,” according to Christian Akbar, a writer at Research Papers UK.
“This can save marketers from manually writing personalized emails one by one for an email marketing campaign.”
Any business that wants to succeed understands the importance of engaging consumers and developing strong relationships with them.
Fortunately, many marketing automation tools focus on ways to enhance the customer experience. Some common ways marketing automation improves personalization include personalized email messages that address the customer by name and personalized recommendations that are tailored specifically to their purchase history.
Marketing automation technology promotes the conversion of prospective consumers into paying customers by using tools such as action-triggered emails. These emails automatically engage the consumer whenever they complete one of the specified action triggers.
One of the most popular triggered emails occurs when a customer adds a product in their cart and abandons it without completing the checkout process. The email automatically reminds the prospective customer of the product after they’ve exited the website.
Often, these emails give the nudge the consumer needs to follow through with the purchase.
Track And Analyze Results
One of the most useful benefits of implementing marketing automation as a marketer is the ability to measure the success of your strategies.
Automation provides marketers a way to quantify the return of investment of their marketing efforts with ROI tracking. This allows businesses to see which marketing avenues are the most profitable and which ones are not performing as well.
Therefore, marketing automation equips businesses with the information to decide which marketing efforts to continue to invest in or eliminate.
Conclusion
The good news for businesses who have yet to leverage the power of market automation is that it’s not too late.
While it may be challenging to implement at first for some marketers, the numerous benefits of marketing automation are undoubtedly worth the learning curve for businesses. More than anything, marketing automation tools should focus on the customer experience. These are the most successful and advantageous forms of marketing automation for growth.
However, it’s important to remember that regardless of the tools provided by marketing automation software, it must be paired with a good strategy to achieve results.
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Jenny Williams is a marketing analyst and business writer at Thesis Writing Service and Lucky Assignments. She also writes articles about the latest marketing trends and solutions for Gumessays service blog.